TrendingTEA, Episode 12: Other people’s tea — on Al Franken, Donald Trump and the cap of our anger being pried off

Nov 16, 2017

I’m not going to lie; I had a WHOLE other topic I was going to write about this week.

I told myself (and my partner) that I wanted — no, needed — to be light and funny, because Trump’s aftershocks were getting a little too real. So my TrendingTEA topic was going to be a commentary on all the crazy protests that have happened this week.

From right-wing conservatives destroying their Keurigs because the coffee maker company threatened to pull their ads from Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News to Papa Johns’ Tweets giving Nazis the middle finger because their sales have sucked since people have been boycotting them, to the online protest of Blake Shelton being named “People’s Sexiest Man Alive” to Cards Against Humanity winning life by buying a plot of land on the U.S. Mexico border — this was going to be my week of fun, frivolity and humor.

That is, until I woke up and opened Facebook and CNN to the news that Trump is rolling back Obama’s ban on importing elephant “trophies” from Africa to the States, and the picture of Al Franken groping a female soldier while she was sleeping.

All my lighthearted humor flew out the window, because all I could think about as I was writing my “fluff” tea was WTF?!

As in, WTF is going on in our world? As in, are we really trying to kill our planet and all it’s inhabitants — elephants and humans included? As in, are we going to survive him? (“Him” as in Trump’s asininity?)

Because right now it feels like the world is falling apart.

You know how if you shake a coke bottle, even if you let it sit for weeks after, it still explodes all over the place once the cap comes off because it was festering in all its own carbonation?

Well, right now we are said carbonation and the cap on our anger, on our silence that has been bolted down for years is being pried by with our own hands. And we are calling out everyone and anything that has gotten in our way.

Should we have called it out when it happened? Yes. But, should that stop anyone from vocalizing their fury or their pain now? Absolutely not.

Because just like that bottle cap, once it’s off, it’s all coming out, whether we want it to or not. And we are being bombarded with other people’s tea being spilled EVERYWHERE.

But we have to be careful we don’t drown in it, t hat we don’t get so caught up trying to swim in it that we lose sight of the real shit show.

And the real shit-show is our president and what he’s doing, not just to our country, but to our planet. We have called everyone else out but the one that needs it the most: Trump. Because you can’t oust Al, or even Roy, without angrily calling on the president to resign over his numerous unwanted sexual assaults.

And yet, despite swimming in my own anger, I can’t help but wonder if all this push back against social, racial and gender injustice would have happened if Trump hadn’t been elected president? Would we still be as angry? Would we still be as militant? Would we still be praising Colin Kaepernick and naming him GQ’s Citizen of the Year? Would we still have elected Danica Roem over the “chief homophobe?” Would we still be calling people out for their wrongdoings, including their wrongdoings from decades ago?

The answer is, I don’t know. And that scares me, because the one thing I can’t keep from asking myself is: Was Trump elected to jar us awake from our peaceful, contented social-political slumber under Obama?

Were we asleep? Would we be the same vocal society? Does the end justify the means?

In other words, when people read about these years under Trump, will hindsight have them saying, “It was all worth it?”

Because it sure as hell doesn’t feel worth it now. But if everything is supposed to mean something, if everything happens for a reason, then this (Trump) has to mean something too. Right?